Milli Vanilli

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/wiki/Milli Vanillicreator

Fab Morvan (left) and Rob Pilatus (right) with NARAS president C. Michael Greene (center), February 1990

Girl, you know it's— Girl, you know it's— Girl, you know it's— Girl, you know it's— —Milli Vanilli, in the moment that ended their musical careers

Milli Vanilli was an R&B, pop, and dance music project created by Frank Farian (of Boney M fame) in Munich, West Germany, in 1988. The group was formed with Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus. The group's debut album Girl You Know It's True achieved international success and earned them a Grammy Award for Best New Artist on February 21, 1990. Milli Vanilli became one of the most popular pop acts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Their success turned to infamy when the Grammy award was withdrawn after Los Angeles Times author Chuck Philips revealed that lead vocals on the record were not the voices of Morvan and Pilatus. They recorded a comeback album in 1998 but Rob Pilatus died before the album was released.

A documentary of the same name was released on Paramount+ in 2023, featuring interviews and archival footage from both Morvan and Pilatus. A dramatic account of the group's rise and fall entitled Girl You Know It's True was released in Germany in the same year and in the US in 2024.

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Discography:

• All or Nothing (1988)
• Girl You Know It's True (1989)
• The Moment of Truth (1991)
• Back and In Attack (1998; cancelled)

Milli Vanilli provides examples of the following tropes:

• Biopic: The 2023 drama film named after their Signature Song.
• Broken Record: "Girl you know it's-- Girl you know it's- Girl you know it's-- Girl you know it's-- Girl you know it's--"
• Clumsy Copyright Censorship: They made an animated appearance in Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, as the Princess' favorite pop group in the Real World, just mere weeks before they were outed as impostors. Subsequent airings of the episode clumsily overdub the songs with a generic instrumental piece.
• Determinator: Fab Morvan, despite the tumultuous career he had with his best friend, is still pursuing a musical career. While not to the same level of fame as he and Rob once had, he's now at peace with his stormy past and is still enjoying his career to this day.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Despite having endured most of The Nineties as a laughing stock of the music industry, Fab Morvan managed to overcome the debacle and re-establish his career as a solo singer, DJ and public speaker at least to some success. This sadly did not go well with his best friend Rob who fell into a deep depression and substance abuse issues, culminating in his untimely death in 1997.
• Fake Band: While lipsyncing on stage is a performance, it isn't the type of performance people expect when they go to what's billed as a concert. They eventually defied this trope when they performed as "Rob & Fab" in the mid-1990s.
• Idol Singer: Frank Farian enlisted Morvan and Pilatus to be the face of the band and for that reason alone, manufacturing Milli Vanilli as a marketable pop act.
• The Invisible Band: An infamous example.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Subsequent releases of their albums come with a sticker crediting the session singers, relegating Rob and Fab as "visual performers".
• Self-Deprecation: Rob and Fab appeared in a commercial for Carefree Sugarless Gum where they poked fun at the scandal they got themselves into. Some speculate that they did it for a paycheck as pretty much everyone hates them by that point, especially given the scandal's impact on Rob.
• Silly Love Songs: Most of the group's output is pretty much this set to pop-rap or R&B.
• Updated Rerelease: Girl You Know It's True is a North American repackaging of their European debut album All or Nothing.
• Your Normal Is Our Taboo:
  • Farian's business model of having fake frontmen raised little fuss in Europe; not crediting the actual singers is a whole can of worms especially when they attempted to break through the American market.
  • This is also par for the course in Bollywood, where actors lip-sync to "playback singers" who do the actual performing in filmi performances. To Bollywood's credit however, playback singers such as Asha Bhosle (whom Westerners may recognise as the Indian singer sampled in The Black Eyed Peas' hit single "Don't Phunk with My Heart") are given equal credit with the actors miming their songs and are celebrities in their own right.